Projects

Spider Star

The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon... Read More.

Praise for Star Dragon

"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin

"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM

There’s definitely a double standard when it comes to atheists and Christians. Guess who is better at turning the other cheek? I guess it’s okay if it’s the oppressed minority, because they’re more used to not getting their way in all things all the time, and must be called militant when they do the same thing as mainstream religious folks. Right? A little ironic that this is coming from a black neighborhood, from people who 40 years ago were fighting for their own right to be heard. Again, 40 years.

Quoting Mooney: â€œBut where Coyne sees sheer science-religion incompatibility, I see something else: An opportunity. For it seems to me that if we could only dislodge the idea that evolution is contradictory to peopleâ€™s belief in â€œJesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%),â€ then they would have no problem with evolution. In fact, the passage above shows that many of them (62%) already know evolution is good scienceâ€“itâ€™s the perception of religious conflict that is holding them back.â€

Further to the data, it shows that there is clearly a perception that science and religion are incompatible. On many counts, this is because they *are* incompatible. You say you want to demonstrate compatibility. How does one do that between the religious concept of creation and evolution? You convince them to become watered down deists?

I’ve lamented about these sorts of issues in the past. Picking and choosing which science to believe has no intellectual integrity, and when science and religion are in direct conflict, science provides the only reliable information. Thor doesn’t cause storms, for instance, and no one today has a problem with that. But when State Senators aren’t called out for “we know the Earth is 6000 years old” bullshit, that’s not helping. That sort of religious belief isn’t ever going to be compatible with the science, and pretending it is doesn’t help.

An old article, On Thud and Blunder by Poul Anderson, about writing sword and sorcery tales. New to me. And it’s about the fantasy equivalent of hard science fiction, about how to research things and get them a bit more realistic.

New anthology contest now open, 8 Minutes. “Something has happened to the sun. In 8 Minutes everything changes!” If you don’t understand the significance of 8 minutes, think of the finite speed of light.

As for war… you don’t have to be very scientifically literate at all to know that the answer is “of course humans will stop having wars”. It’s extremely anthropocentric to imagine that humans will exist at the end of the universe, let alone still be having wars.

Or is this just about basic literacy and logical thinking?

Speaking of which, the childbeaters in New Zealand have forced a (non-binding) referendum but don’t seem able to phrase it meaningfully. So there’s a wonderful debate about what the question means and what the votes might indicate (“Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?”… by definition, hitting a child is not good parenting, so the question loses it there for many people). My preferred alternative is “should submitted an ambiguous question for referendum be a criminal offence”

Re the Io9 article: As an author who’s published online I am also unsure about how positive a thing digital publishing will be. Itâ€™s certainly the case that most self-published PoD and ebooks are of low quality, badly edited, etc. And that the traditional route ensures a certain baseline quality, though literary opinion will always differ to the point where it can seem quite subjective. Still, with the new reading technology (I read that new kindle displays standard pdf format, but difficult to buy in the UK), epublishing should gain more credibility.